Mr. Foo: Really Bent

Our new blogging amigo Mr. Foo, up in north Texas, has drunk the recumbent cycling kool-aid and finds it to his liking.

Technorati tag: Recumbent Bicycles

Amex Card: Counting the Cost

Deb over at Write Lightning is not happy about the effect of increasing American Express fees on local businesses, and she cites the example of a restaurant who can no longer afford to accept the credit card.

This is not a new issue, although it may be gaining more attention in the US. But one of the first things we learned when we started going on annual dive trips to various locations in the Caribbean and Central America was that very few shops accepted American Express, and those that did placed a surcharge on the purchase to try to recoup the higher service fees charged by Amex.

Even in the US, I was once able to negotiate a discount on a fairly large purchase by agreeing to pay cash rather than using the Amex Gold card that I initially flashed at the merchant.

This isn't a problem for us anymore, as we cut our card in half a dozen years ago, following the company's refusal to pay an insurance claim following a rental car incident on the island of Bonaire. (It was simply a ruined tire, if you must know.) After paying the annual fees for years, it was a slap in the face for the company to refuse to honor the first obligation we had ever presented to it. And, as Deb points out, I'm sure no one at Amex lost any sleep over the loss of our account.

But we've been more than satisfied with its lower-rent cousins -- Mastercard and Discover -- and so have the merchants and restaurants we deal with. I'll be surprised if Deb's restaurant-owning friends notice any difference at all in their business once they cut Amex loose -- is there anyone in the world who carries only an Amex card? -- but they should see a nice uptick in their bottom line.

Book Review: "Blindness"

I started reading José Saramago's Blindness around 9:00 p.m. on Friday and finished it about an hour ago (it's Sunday, about 3:30 p.m.). 326 pages in less than 48 hours. That's not exactly a speed-reading record, but it should be taken as an indication of the mesmerizing quality of this novel about what happens when an epidemic of blindness sweeps through the population of an unidentified nation.

This book was published eleven years ago and there's nothing I can add to the discussion about its message. Neither do I wish to reveal any additional details of the plot. All I want to do is share my reaction to the novel, since others have expressed an interest.

The author acts as an omniscient narrator, an observer and occasional interpreter of the events that unfold through the progression of the "disease" (if that's what it is). The writing style is almost stream of consciousness, but I found it not difficult at all to comprehend. (I did wonder how much, if any, of this style came from the fact that the novel was translated from Portuguese. There's a rather poignant publisher's footnote at the end informing the reader that the original translator died before completing the work, which was taken over by another person.) But the words and construction are just the delivery mechanism for a story with details that are by turns, incredibly disturbing and touching. Those details are so vividly described, so realistic, so brutal, that one might feel transported into the story...and that's often not a comfortable place to be.

One Gazette reader wanted to know if Blindness would cause nightmares, and my answer is that if one is prone to taking what they read into their subconscious then, yes, this is the stuff that nightmares are made of. But it would be unfair to leave it at that, because the diligent reader will find eventually find some redemption in the story.

Saramago is a Communist and an atheist, and I find some of his political views repugnant; his view of the world and humanity are colored by a lens that is very different from mine. But he has created a undeniably powerful novel, one that consumed my weekend, and I don't regret the investment of time.

Next up, Saramago's follow-up novel published this year: Seeing. I think I'll wait a few days, though...maybe just enjoy looking at things for a while.

Blindness/Seeing

I bit the bullet and bought both Blindness and Seeing at Barnes & Noble this evening. The former grabs you from the first page, just as Mis_nomer reported.

I love the way Blindness has a white cover, and Seeing has a black one, both with similar layouts. I presume the latter book is a kind of sequel, but as I wrote in a comment on Mis_nomer's blog, I don't like to know too much in advance about the books I buy.

I doubt that I'll have anything significant to add to the excellent reviews of Blindness by Mis_nomer and Jim over at Serotoninrain, but I'll be sure to report on Seeing.

Technorati tags: José Saramago | Blindness | Seeing

Springtime in west Texas

Spring means different things to different people, but to quite a few folks in this part of the country, it means time to start watching out for rattlesnakes.

Take the fellow in Abilene (a couple of hours northeast of here), for example, who was using a forklift to clean up Patterson Drilling's yard. He picked up a pit* liner and immediately set it back down, phoned the office and said "we need some men with shotguns."

According to the report, they killed 62 rattlers...but as many got away as they shot.

Now, I'm all in favor of live and let live when it comes to giving the occasional slithering reptile the freedom to keep the place free of rats and other vermin, but nobody needs twelve dozen rattlesnakes.

*Gives a whole new meaning to the term "pit viper," doesn't it?

Tip o'the hat to MLB who also expressed an ever-so-slight bit of sympathy for "the poor poisonous little guys."

Reaping the Whirlwind: Ad Agency sues a blogger

Read this and then sit back and watch what happens. I suspect that Warren Kremer Paino Advertising LLC has no idea of the incredible dumbness of what it's just done, but will find out pretty quickly.

The blogger in question, Lance Dutson, has had an ongoing campaign to expose what he believes is incompetence on the part of the Maine Tourist Board and its advertising contractor. Exhibit A is a print ad that ran with a phone sex number instead of the correct agency phone number. For pointing out this and other faux pas, he's been slapped with a multi-million dollar lawsuit alleging libel, copyright infringement, and defamation.

Stay tuned...this will be page one in the blogosphere for a good while.

Hat tip: WSJ's Law Blog

Technorati tags: Maine Web Report | Frivolous and Chilling Lawsuits

(Non) Disappearing Act

I don't understand all the hubbub about how magician and illusionist David Copperfield tricked some teenaged robbers into thinking he didn't have anything worth stealing.

I mean, if the guy's as good as he claims to be, this should have played out much differently:

"Huh?! Where'd he go?!"

"Don't know, man...one second he was right here, and the next...nothing!"

"Yeah...and where'd the baby squirrel come from, dude?"

"This is freakin' me out, man...I'm outta here."

An Artistic Approach to Fighting Crime

I spend most of my waking hours deep in thought, figuring out ways to help mankind. This likely explains why my lawn looks the way it does, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, today I've been considering ways to bring high-speed freeway car chases to less violent conclusions. Yesterday, I watched on CNN as a SWAT team shot and killed a murder suspect who led them on a chase along a California freeway, and I wondered if there wasn't a better solution.

One answer would be to equip all vehicles with tamperproof, radio-activated engine kill-switches, and give the police the transmitters to control them (sort of like the transmitters that allow the firetrucks to remotely change traffic signals in order to clear the traffic ahead of them). This approach has many flaws, not the least of which is the potential -- OK, the certainty -- that those transmitters would fall into the wrong hands. [Like mine, for example. I'd love to have one to rein in drivers who I consider to be idiots or jerks, recognizing that the likely upshot would be that mine would occasionally be the only moving vehicle on the road. But, think about it. Wouldn't you just love to kill the engine of that guy who just ran a red light in front of you?]

Another drawback is lack of specificity. You wouldn't want a Matrix-like EMF transmitter that shut down everything within transmission range (I guess we'd need to make sure that the other police cars were shielded...but then what happens when one of them is stolen?). A solution would be to tie the receiver frequency to the vehicle identification number (and then to make the receiver into a transmitter as well, which would broadcast the VIN).

Well, this is all very complicated and not as artistically satisfying as the solution that I think should be given further consideration, and that is to employ technology that convinces the lawless driver that it's in his best interests to stop... without actually throwing up a physical barrier.

How to do this? Well, look no further than the timeless feud between Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, where the former cartoon character often endeavors to trick the latter into knocking himself senseless by running through a tunnel opening that is actually just some black paint thrown on a solid rock face. (Never mind the fact that Road Runner generally successfully disappears into the tunnel, whereas the coyote tries it and knocks himself silly. It's just a cartoon, folks.)

But the philosophy's the same: use a trompe l'oeil display to fool the offender into thinking he's about to smash into something unpleasant. Simple, huh?

The execution is the tricky part, but I've got that figured out, too. Enter one Julian Beever, the world-acclaimed practitioner of the art of anamorphic illusions. Beever's sidewalk art is simply amazing. He uses photorealistic illustration techniques combined with perspective to make paintings that seem to rise up from the sidewalk when viewed from just the right angle.

It's that latter phrase that we have to address in order to perfect this solution, as the apparent reality of the anamorphic illusion disappears as one gets too close to the image. But this is a problem that's easily solved with a radar gun and a laptop. All you have to do is mount the image on a large flat surface which is itself mounted on a hydraulically-controlled mechanism that tilts up and down. This mechanism would be towed and stationed across the highway where the offender was heading. As the vehicle approaches, the image comes into view. (Let's say that it looks like a deep ravine suddenly bisecting the highway, one that no criminal in his right mind would want to drive into. [Let's hope that Keanu Reeves never actually hijacks a bus.])

As the vehicle gets closer, the radar gun/GPS device plots the precise location with respect to the image, and sends a signal to the computer controlling the hydraulic angle-adjuster. Voila! You have an anamorphic illusion that maintains its effectiveness right up to the last second, where, presumably, the driver will either stop or attempt to turn around (at which point the coyote drops a huge net over the car...but that's another installment).

Of course, a more satisfying variation on this technique would be to actually have a massive barrier dragged across the highway, coupled with an anamorphic illusion that makes it look as though the highway is clear. But the creation of replacement illusions and tilting devices could get expensive.

OK, I've done my job. It's up to you guys to take this idea and run with it.

I have a birthday coming up in June...

Hint, hint...

Fire Ant Theatre: Classical Readings, Vol. II

Our second installment of FATCRs takes us places where, really, no one should ever go. Oh, it begins innocently enough, with a reading of a short original essay, but then something goes dreadfully wrong. I'm at a complete loss to explain why I ever thought this was a good idea.

For what it's worth, I don't own any woven hemp sandals, and despite how it may sound, no living creatures were harmed in the making of this recording. As far as the effect of listening to it...well, you're own your on.

Go ahead, fellow bloggers; laugh it up...but consider the gauntlet tossed.

Abbye Update

I've had a couple of folks ask for an update on Abbye, and since that represents a significant proportion of my readership, I figure I'd better oblige.

Abbye's still got Cushing's Disease, diabetes, and arthritis and she's still blind, but other than that, she's doing pretty well. We should all be so fortunate.

She's got as much energy as she ever had, and we're still doing her twice daily walks around the neighborhood. Her hair is coming back in quickly and thickly, although it appears that she may be mutating into a beaver, since her tail is, well, flat. I'm sure that's just an interim situation until the hair gets long enough to make her resemble another species. At least we hope so. We'd really prefer not to have a dog who goes around slapping the floor with her tail whenever she wants something.

She's also got her appetite back, which is a good thing for a dog getting two insulin shots each day. However, in order to keep her interested in food (she's always been a picky eater, at least as far as dogfood is concerned), MLB has stocked up on three kinds of dog food (two dry, one canned) and keeps a bag of chicken tenders in the fridge to prime the pump, or the pup, as the case may be. Occasionally, she'll have all three kinds of food in her bowl, because we never know what she'll be willing to eat. Did I mention the scrambled eggs?

The shots are still an adventure. Abbye has always been a drama queen, so even though the needles are about the width of a human hair, she manages to unleash a blood-curdling yelp about half the time. Mind you, the yelp sometimes comes before the needle stick, which tends to minimize the amount of sympathy she gets. Of course, she might also be recalling very early when we were still trying to get the hang of things, and MLB was holding her while I gave the shot, and it turned out that she was immobilizing her to the point of where she, well, couldn't breathe.

The blindness has required the biggest adjustment, as you might imagine. She's fine in the house or in the backyard, but taking her for a walk requires constant attention to make sure she's not walking into anything or falling off the curb. We also need to make sure she's OK around other dogs and people.

We're trying to use a system to alert her to step onto or off curbs, using a combination of verbal commands and tugs on the leash (she hates leash tugs). She's catching on, but it's sometimes a bit comical, in sort of a sad way. If we're a bit early with the "up" command, she starts high-stepping -- goose-stepping, really, like...um, you know.

Seriously, though, we're pretty relieved that she's doing so much better than a few months ago. The vet is still trying to get a good handle on the right insulin levels, but we knew that would be a long process. The main thing is that her quality of life is good, and there's no reason why she shouldn't have a few good years ahead of her.

Random Thursday

This is so much easier than actually giving any thought to a post...

• Print Ad of the Week goes to the new one for the Dodge Caliber, which I scanned from the new issue of Mountain Bike. Click on the thumbnail at right to see the full-sized version (minus all the annoying-but-inevitable fine print at the bottom urging you not to try to xerox your car's butt at home). It may be carrying the American tendency to anthropomorphize our vehicles to an extreme, but it's still funny. If you like junior high humor, of course. Which, of course, I do.


• Did I mention that I drive a Dodge?


• And speaking of ads, remember back a few days when we were talking about the Alltel wireless phone ads that showcase the competitors' spokesmen/women/things? (No? Shame on you. Here's it.) I wondered whether Alltel would build on that first ad, and the answer came this morning when it ran on Fox & Friends. Instead of the ending group hug, however, it concluded with the geeky Can-You-Hear-Me-Now? guy from Verizon (thanks, Beth!) leering at the Catherine Zeta-Jones clone, asking, "does this mean I can call her?" Pseudo-CZJ responds with a silent eye-roll that forever brands Verizon Guy as the all-time loser we figured him to be. Excellent. And, again, gutsy for Alltel to conclude the ad with the spotlight on the competition.


• Here's it is fun to type and funner to say. Try it.


• Which classic rock group did a song referring to the all-time loser?


• I see that a distinguished Congressional panel has done intensive study and concluded that FEMA is broken, can't be fixed, and needs to be replaced. I dare that panel to study Congress. Double-dare.


• Speaking of Fox & Friends, I liked E.D. Hill's suggestion this morning that if all Mexicans and illegal Mexican immigrants are going to boycott US products and services on May 1 in protest of the immigration reform movement, they should go all the way with it and refuse to accept any of the free government-subsidized social and medical services. The US taxpayers might just come out ahead on that deal.


• In closing, let me just say that any blogger worth his or her salt should be willing to make a fool of himself or herself, just to prove that he or she isn't taking himself or herself too seriously. As if I haven't already sufficiently shown my capacity to do just that, there's a good chance that I'm going to take that sentiment to a whole new level tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Just another Content Free™ post from the Fire Ant Gazette, where we take seriously our pledge to always be "cheap but not inexpensive." I urge all my readers to show your support by not buying any Fire Ant merchandise on May 1. (After all, why should May 1 be any different than the other 364 days of the year?)

"That's Commander Nephew to you..."

Guess whose nephew was just named as next year's commander of the Midland High School Air Force Junior ROTC program?

Here's a hint:

He's come a long way from the kid who used to carry cookies under his bicycle helmet in case he needed an in-ride snack. Well, he's taller now, anyway. ;-)

Riding with Los Caracolleros

Scene: Somewhere out west, a goldarn ways from anywhere on the map...

Tom guided his horse up next to where Chaco sat astride his pony, his dark eyes squinting towards a still-brilliant setting sun whose rays were tempered by the first signs of a thunderstorm beginning to boil up from the horizon.

"Dang, hombre, that don't look good, do it?" Tom muttered, as much to himself as to Chaco, who slowly shook his head.

"No, it don't, amigo, and that's the last thing we need, what with a herd already half loco from the heat."

They sat silently for a few moments, recalling the last time a lightning strike spooked the herd. It was like trying to rope a whirlwind, bringing those stampeding animals back under control. For sure, once they got moving, neither heaven nor hell could convince 'em to settle back down...but that's exactly what Tom and Chaco and the rest of their compadres were paid to do. Those critters weren't the fastest on God's green earth, but they were without a doubt the most stubborn, and Lord help the poor wrangler who got in the way of a spooked herd.

"Well, there's aught we can do but cinch the saddle a tad tighter, and hope that ol' storm decides to move elsewhere."

"Si, amigo. I just wish el jefe would think a little harder next time he buys a herd. Muerté!"

With that, Chaco and Tom brought their horses around, heading back to the camp for a last cup of stale coffee. It was going to be another long night on the range...nothing new, however, for the brave caracolleros and the herd of animals that provided their livelihood.

Technorati tag: Giant African Land Snails

Chernobyl

Bryan over at Arguing with Signposts reminded me that today marks the 20th anniversary of the "worst man-made disaster in history."

I have vivid memories of where we were when we first saw the televised reports of the Chernobyl tragedy. We were in a batik shop in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. It was our first trip to the Caribbean...our first trip out of the country, in fact, and we were having a wonderful time, along with the two couples we were traveling with. Seeing that news report (I supposse it was on CNN International) had a strange effect. We were already out of our comfort zones and this event -- with all the uncertainty that surrounded the first few days -- made us feel even more disconnected.

Even so, I doubt that any of us had the slightest inkling at that time that two decades later, scientists would still be trying to assess -- and contain -- the damage emanating from Chernobyl.

New Reality Show Filmed in West Texas

Les over at West Texas TV reminds us that the local PBS station will be airing "Texas Ranch House" May 1-4. This educational "reality show" puts fifteen people into the setting of a west Texas ranch as it existed in 1867, and shows their attempts to cope with the tough life of that time and place.

As I mentioned in a comment on Les's post, it took some detective work but based on the credits for the project, it appears the show was filmed in Brewster County on the historic O2 Ranch, located south of Alpine, 180 miles or so from Midland. This is some of the most majestic and desolately beautiful country you'll ever lay eyes on.

For those not fortunate enough to live in west Texas, this show appears to be included in the national PBS lineup, so look for it in your local listings if you want to get at least an idea about some of the scenery in these parts.

Technorati tag: Texas Ranch House

County Commissioners may have fixed what they broke

I was surprised to learn last week that when the new Horseshoe Exhibition Complex opened, the previous exhibit building and grounds were mothballed. This resulted in a hardship for at least one local nonprofit group that had depended on access to the latter facility, and which doesn't have the budget to pay the $1,000/day to use the new facility. It seems that Midland County 4-H clubbers were using the old facility's arena at no charge for rodeo practice.

Credit the county commissioners for recognizing a potential PR quagmire when they're shown one, as one of the footnoted actions in a report on yesterday's commissioners meeting was this:

I assume that this use is provided at the same rental rate as before, i.e. zero, although that's not addressed in the article. It's also not clear as to what, exactly, the "county exhibit building" is, although within the context of the first article, my guess is that it's the old location and not the new one. Watch for additional commentary to further illuminate the issue over at Jessica's Well.

"I'm King Dork and I want you to be my Queeeeeeen...."

The debut novel by Frank Portman (of The Mr. T Experience), King Dork, has its own theme song...or, rather, title track.

Read a book review here, listen to the song here, and order the goshdarn novel here. (That last link, at Amazon.com, also has some additional and interesting content by the author.)

Tip o'the hat to Bookslut

Technorati tags: Frank Portman | King Dork

Alltel's Ad: Other People's Spokesmen

Have you seen the new Alltel commercial touting its wireless plan that allows subscribers to call a specified list of people for free, regardless of which wireless provider they use? The plan itself is interesting, although I'm surprised no one has thought of it before. But the cool thing about the ad is how it includes the competitors' spokespersons:

OK, these aren't the actual spokespersons, but look-alikes ginned up for the campaign. Can you match each one with the company he/she/it represents? (I couldn't. I mean, they are all as familiar as the back of my hand, but I'll be danged if I can put a company name to the face...just another frustration for the ad industry, no doubt. Oh, except for the little Cingular guy; I did match him properly.)

I know there have been instances where companies have included their competitors in their ad campaigns, although I can't recall any specifics offhand. Most attempt to show them in a negative light. This example is about as neutral as the strategy gets, although in the TV version one of the competitors issues a mild protest at the beginning to the effect of "uh, that's not what we do."

It's a gutsy move by Alltel, and it will be interesting to see if they build on the campaign.

Seeing this ad also made me think that there are worse things than to go through life playing a look-alike to Catherine Zeta-Jones. Unless you're a guy, and then you've probably got some issues to deal with.

Technorati tags: Alltel | Alltelcircle Ads

Funereal Observations

I served as a pallbearer yesterday afternoon for a man in our Sunday School class, and the experience reminded me again of the interesting challenges that funeral directors face.

The details aren't important; let me just say that there were ten pallbearers, and the weight of the casket was close to 800 pounds. The casket fit into the hearse with about two inches clearance on each side, and it went through the doors of the church with less clearance than that.

It took us almost five minutes to position the casket on the rolling cart (I'm sure there's a technical term for it) to the director's satisfaction before attempting to move it into the church; we made several adjusting moves of less than an inch. He was worried about it tipping over, an event which he's seen before and which is, as he put it in a funereral understatement, "not a good thing."

Pallbearer safety was at the forefront. "If it starts tipping, boys, just let 'er go. You can't stop it, so get out of the way. We don't want anyone hurt."

Fortunately, there were no mishaps (I can't predict how all the pallbearers will feel upon arising from bed this morning; I have a couple of new aches in my shoulders). The paths at the church and the cemetery were relatively smooth, and the dignity of the occasion was maintained.

I debated about the appropriateness of posting this, but decided it was OK since the man's son referred in his otherwise moving eulogy to "the biggest casket I've ever seen." I had just never before considered these kinds of practical issues.

I'm Pro Choice (When it comes to the Dixie Chicks)

My good friend, author, raconteur, newspaper editor, ultra-suave man-about-town, and fellow blogger Jimmy Patterson argues eloquently and passionately on the front page of today's local newspaper that the Dixie Chicks are being given a raw deal by local radio stations who are apparently still refusing to give airplay to the group's music in the wake of Chickita Natalie Maines's assertion a couple of years ago that she was ashamed to be from George W. Bush's home state.

I'm in complete agreement with a couple of Jimmy's assertions. First, Ms. Maines's right to publicly express her opinion is constitutionally protected. Second, any threats of death or harm to her or her family (assuming they're real and not planks in a PR platform) are despicable.

Where I think mi amigo wanders into the weeds is when he implies that local radio stations have some kind of obligation to play the Chicksters's music, and that music consumers have a similar obligation to listen to it or even *gasp* buy it because not to do so somehow stifles The Dialogue.

To my way of thinking, Dixie Chicks, Inc. is a business, and if it's not a publicly traded corporation in the traditional sense, it still has stakeholders who determine its success. The product DCI is pitching has a lot to do with music, but it's more than that. It's a shrewdly marketed package that owes a large amount of success to the fact that the Chicks are relatively young, relatively fetching, and generally astute about the preferences of their "stockholders," who may also be referred to as "those who buy their CDs or pay to download their music, including but not limited to young hormone-driven guys." Part of their business strategy -- no doubt worked out in detail in a boardroom filled with lots of young marketing gurus with soul patches and PowerPoint presentations -- is to be a bit edgy, a bit controversial (which Jimmy astutely acknowledges in his article), and if you don't buy that, just take [another] look at the cover of Entertainment Weekly where the Chicklets choose to appear in their birthday suits. Think that wasn't a stroke of marketing genius (or desperation? Hard to distinguish the two, sometimes)?

Anyway, what Ms. Maines did on that London stage in 2003 was commit the cardinal sin of forgetting that she's both a marketer and a product, and, worse, of failing to understand the desires of her stockholders. Chalk it up to hubris, sincere exuberance, or plain old ignorance -- and it's probably a combination of all three -- but for whatever reasons, she stepped over the strategic line that was drawn for her a long time before, and in doing so made a lot of "investors" decide to realign their portfolios.

Ms. Maines is not guilty of treason, or of giving aid or improving morale of the enemy. Lord help us if country music -- especially the Nashville variety -- is that influential. No, it seems to me that her sin is primarily that of being an incompetent businesswoman. Unfortunately for her and her fellow Chickories, the wages of sin in this case are manifest on the demand side of the equation, and continuing to harp on "stockholders" for their unwillingness to invest in damaged goods just compounds the error.

It should be further noted that local radio stations are apparently unwilling to make a similar mistake -- that of ignoring the wishes of their customers -- and I was educated to believe that giving the customers what they want (or not giving them what they don't want) is fundamental to our great American Economy. I suppose we can argue that their marketing research is faulty, but I'm pretty sure they know more about that than we do.

So, while I support mi amigo Jimmy's right to buy and listen to everything the Chickorettes choose to put on the market, I don't think he's made a particularly compelling argument as to why anyone else should jump on the bandwagon. It might help, however, if they'd do another magazine cover, perhaps for Guns and Ammo.

Disclosure: I wouldn't know a Dixie Chick song if it bit me on the iPod. But since when has being informed been a requirement for punditry?

Blogging IS forthcoming...

I've a commitment as a pallbearer in a funeral right after lunch, and with the usual Monday meanderings I'm running behind in my bloggage quota. But, never fear...I shall return later today...with a smackdown of another local blogger, no less! ;-)

Intriguing "Blindness"

This post makes me want to read this book.

Have any of you read it?

Technorati tag: Jose Saramago

A Stinker of Mammoth Proportions

OK, I'll admit I'm jumping to conclusions with the post title, as I've tuned in midway to the premier broadcast of Mammoth on the Sci Fi Channel. But after seven minutes, it's not looking good.

The movie is apparently about a mammoth (d'oh) that has somehow returned to life and is now wreaking havoc.

Most of the SFC's "original programming" movies are so bad as to be nearly compelling (Sabretooth comes quickly to mind). The intriguing thing is how they get name-brand actors to appear in these things. For example, Tom Skerritt and Summer Glau (of Serenity fame) are in Mammoth.

Well, another ten minutes have sped by, and it's obvious this one's being played for laughs, which is not a bad strategy. Summer Glau just referred to the "zombie soul sucking effect" of a disembodied hand, which should count for something.

However, up to now, there's been no appearance of the beast, a distinct shortcoming in a movie purportedly about a mammoth.

Where's that list of world's worst jobs?

We found the following label affixed to a common household product:

My guess is that since this label was stuck on a roll of toilet paper, the instructive note in the lower left corner was placed there not so much for the benefit of the manufacturer, but more likely at the insistence of the contractor to whom coupon redemption was outsourced.

If you know what I mean...

What's gotten into DP?

Dr. Pepper now has eight variations listed on its website, the latest of which is -- get this -- "Berries and Cream" in both regular and diet.

Where will it end? "Diet Papaya Mango Habañero Choco-Vanilla Swirl Dr. Pepper with Just a Hint of Anise"?

That said, I must admit that the Diet B&C DP was actually pretty good. It has mild raspberry and vanilla flavorings in addition to the regular DP good stuff.

Technorati tag: Diet Berries & Cream Dr. Pepper

Laugh or Cry

Great Baptist joke here, courtesy of Patti at White Pebble.

<sigh> Just wish it wasn't so darned accurate!

Movie Review: "The Sentinel"

Note: No spoilers here. You should know me better than that.

I'm not going to get into the debate about whether Michael Douglas is too old to play a guy doing the things he does in this movie. After all, if Catherine approves, far be it from me to make any snide observations. In any event, he's better cast in The Sentinel than Harrison Ford was in Firewall, so we'll just leave it at that.

It helps that Sentinel is a much better movie than Firewall, even though it suffers from a few huge credibility gaps in the plot. Nonetheless, it has enough twists and turns to get you happily engaged and willing to play along with those gaps.

It also offers an absolutely fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the security measures employed to protect the POTUS (and his wife). I'm sure that much of it was non-factual; I can't imagine the Secret Service allowing a filmmaker to put its actual tactics on-screen, but they rang true anyway.

If you're not a Michael Douglas fan, you might want to skip this one as he appears in about 98% of the scenes. Eva Longoria gets some top billing but she's just an eye-candy afterthought. Kiefer Southerland is, well, intense.

And, no...I'm not going to even comment on the plot. Remember the "no spoilers" disclaimer?

Overall, The Sentinel is a good start to the summer action-adventure offerings. I give it...

Ant Rating:

Notes:

Two of the trailers were for The Omen and The DaVinci Code. I couldn't help snickering at the realization that it's quite likely the former movie is more grounded in truth than the latter. FWIW, I don't plan to see either.

Poseidon? Well, that's another story. It's must-see move-ee. (Sorry.)

The Sentinel was mostly filmed in that jerky, grainy style that's so popular with the kids nowadays. Unfortunately, it sent my wife home midway with motion sickness. Fortunately, we were in separate vehicles so I could fill her in on the remainder of the movie.

Technorati tag: The Sentinel

More "Free" Government Money!

Unlike certain other Midland bloggers, I like the idea of our city having an affordable public transportation system. I wish it was utilized to the extent that it generated revenues that covered operating expenses, but these types of public services can't be realistically viewed as profit-generators.

However, those in charge of the Midland-Odessa Urban Transit District aren't helping their case by saying things like this, found in an article in today's local newspaper reporting on the purchase of bigger and more expensive buses for the system:

I suppose that's technically true in that the city's bank account wasn't tapped for these new buses. But it gives the appearance of overlooking the fact that those dollars do, in fact, come from The City, comprised as it is of all of us individual taxpayers. These buses are not free, in any real sense of the word.

I'm not arguing about whether the expenditures should have been made in the first place, although the timing of the purchase of 5-mpg buses to replace 9-mpg vehicles seems unfortunate, despite the assurances that the TCO is actually favorable. I'd simply advise officials to be more accurate with their pronouncements as to how they're spending our money.

Fire Ant Theatre: Classical Readings, Vol. I

I can't tell you how often people ask me why the Gazette isn't doing more to enhance the cultural and aesthetic sensibilities of our woefully déclassé-leaning society. Well, let me tell you, that's been weighing heavily on my mind, and I've decided to do something about it.

This post inaugurates what I'm sure will be a long-running series in which the great masterpieces of Western Cultural Expression are brought to life through the technological wonder known as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, aka MP3. Simply click the following link to be immediately transported into an aural dimension of wonder and delight.

And, in anticipation of your next question...yes, I am taking requests.*

*Requests that this series be discontinued immediately will be taken under advisement.

Random Thursday

We were discussing the Gazette over coffee and dessert last night and I mentioned that I was having a "creative block" (whatever that means) and a friend asked if that was the real reason for the lack of posts, rather than the workload as I had indicated. I told her that those things went hand-in-hand. When I'm overloaded on the work side of things, that tends to suck dry what little creativity I have to begin with, leaving nothing for blogging...except for posts like this which serve no purpose other than to assure (or warn, as the case may be) folks that I'm still capable of random acts of keyboarding.

• I, for one, am happy to hear that our local H-E-B is expanding. <lileks>Maybe that will mean that it'll finally have the shelf space to carry the Bounty Select-A-Size Paper Towels with the blue floral print that matches our tile backsplash. I'm sick up to here with having to settle for institutional white.</lileks>


• We finally watched The Wedding Crashers, courtesy of NetFlix, and the thing that really struck me was...was that Dwight Yoakam playing the husband in the opening divorce settlement scene? Why, yes...yes, it was. It reinforces Dwight's lock on the category of The Actor Who Most Desperately Needs To Continue Wearing A Cowboy Hat Pulled Down Over His Eyes. Plus, I didn't realize that he was born in Kentucky; he pulls off the Bakersfield, CA act so convincingly, you know?


• It rained today, and is still drizzling a bit at this moment. About a half inch so far, at least in our backyard, and I'm reminded of why rain makes things look so fresh and green in Midland: we get used to dust covering all the plants and grass. (Let's just keep that our little secret; no need to bring the Chamber of Commerce into this, hmm?)


• MLB was called out for Emergency Clothing Rental duty Tuesday night, as The Nephew apparently realized that time was growing short for him to acquire a tux for this weekend's prom. She found him and a friend standing outside the rental store in the mall, sporting deer-in-the-headlight looks. Have you already found what you want, she asked. No...we had to come out here because they started asking us all these questions we couldn't answer, he replied. Like what? she asked. Like, what do I want? was his reply.

OK, it wasn't much, but it was something. And sometimes, that's the best we can hope for. Peace out.

Definitely a dry heat

Just took a quick break for a snack (by the way, there's not a recipe in the world for trail mix that can't be improved via the addition of copious quantities of M&Ms) and checked the Weather Channel: 92 degrees, winds 20 mph (gusting to 29) and... 4% humidity?!

That means the heat index is only 88, so we've got that going for us.

$70 oil is good for business...

...mine, anyway. Not quite a good as actually being in the awl bidness, but there's definitely a trickle-down or halo effect. Regardless, I'm up to here with busy-ness, just in case you're wondering. Feel free to chat amongst yourselves for a bit.

Texas Hill Country 2006: Hilly, Windy, Hot & Wormy

Some random observations from the little burg of Fredericksburg, during our participation in the 2006 edition of the Easter Hill Country Bicycle Tour, hosted this year by the Lubbock Bicycle Club...

• There must be some kind of city ordinance in this German community that prohibits the spelling of the word "house" in any fashion other than "haus." The Pool Haus. The Guest Haus. The Haus of Kraut. (OK, I made that one up.)


• Willie Nelson singing a Beatles song is just wrong. And I don't care how cowgirl-foofy the dress shop, they shouldn't be providing him an outlet for such "music."


• You never know what you're going to encounter on a back country Texas road (in case you're wondering, the bike is ten feet long):

• Spring has not been kind to Texas wildflowers, which were a no-show around Fredericksburg and Kerrville. What we lacked in floral scenery we more than made up in sweat and worms. This was the hottest weekend of the year, with temps hitting the low 90s on Saturday, during our longest ride of the tour (around 50 miles). Strong winds were a mixed curse; they did seem to mitigate the heat somewhat, but made us work the bike that much harder. But the worst part of the weekend was the worms.
  
  Well, technically, they aren't worms...they're caterpillars, commonly known as "oak leaf rollers." For a brief time in the spring of most years, these icky creatures descend by the millions from the foliage of live oaks and other similar trees, dangling by a slender thread that might be 30 or 40 feet long. I snapped a photo to give you an idea; see below. These things are about six inches long and as big around as a bratwurst and deliver a nasty bite that can easily become infected. OK, I lied about all of that. They're only about an inch long or less and don't bite. But they do have a tendency to sway with the breeze and land on your clothes, your hair, your car, your bike, your dog and anything else that you'd normally wish to be caterpillar-free. They're messy and yucky and we hates 'em. And they were out in full force this weekend. (One night during dinner at a cozy little Italian restaurant in F'burg [Pasta Bella, if you must know] I glanced over at a rather large fellow sitting at the next table, and was mesmerized by the sight of one of the caterpillars making its way up his neck, heading for his ear. He never made it, but the whole scene was quite entertaining.)

• We did a bit of shopping in F'burg. Here's a word to the wise: don't go there looking for a grapefruit knife. But we did score some appetizing foodstuffs, and I found some things that seem to be perfect for Blogathon 2006 contest prizes (and, yes, they're what you think they are):

• Unlike 90% of the people who travel from Midland to the Hill Country, we drive I-10, coming and going. We're not interested in doing much other than getting there, and getting back. We make two stops going (the first at the Town & Country in Iraan for driving victuals -- Cheetos and Diet Dr. Peppers; the next at the rest stop outside of Sonora). On the return trip, we hit the same rest stop, and then stop in Ozona for either a snack or a coke or both. But that's neither here nor there. What I really want to do is make a totally objective but unquantified observation. Over the past xx years of traveling the interstate, it's been my belief that the most common out-of-state license plates belonged to either California or Florida. This year, there was a noticeable difference. By far the most prevalent non-Texas license plates I saw were from Mexico, primarily the states of Chihuahua and Coahuila.


• The other thing I saw this weekend was way too many older-than-middle-aged guys riding Harleys. That's not overly annoying; we'd rather share the road with motorcycles than cars, as they have almost as much to lose by tangling with a bicycle as the bicycle itself. No, the annoying thing is the apparent contractual obligation that requires that every visible piece of clothing worn by those riders must sport the Harley-Davidson logo. Guys, here's a fashion tip: the Harley skull-cap doesn't make you look dangerous, except perhaps to that platter of schnitzel at der Auslander (where, by the way, the Kinkster himself was pressing the flesh on Friday night).

All in all, it was a good long weekend, even without the wildflowers and even with the worms. But it was also good to get back to the wide open spaces of west Texas, where the wind is supposed to blow.

Technorati tags: Easter Hill Country Tour | Texas Hill Country | Oak Leaf Rollers

Two Kids and Some Old Folks

I know I said I wasn't posting this week, but some things just can't be ignored.

Here's a photo of my nephew and his friend (and commanding officer, now that I think about it...she's also the daughter of this guy).

Those other two folks look vaguely familiar, but I'm not sure why they're in the scene. Probably just wandered up.

Actually, the former president and his wife, as well as the current First Lady were in Midland today attending the dedication of the George W. Bush Childhood Home, which is now an Official Presidential Site. The kiddos were in attendance as part of the Honor Guard provided by the Midland High School Air Force Junior ROTC.

I'm not sure why Laura Bush isn't in this shot, unless she has a strict one-photo-per-family policy.

Gone Fishing

Not literally, but posting will be light to non-existent through next Sunday.

Ten Sure-Fire Best Selling Plots For Your Novel

Or, to be more honest about it, Ten Novel Pitches You Probably Shouldn't Make.

Those of you aspiring to be published writers might find the comment thread to the preceding post enlightening. If you don't care about being a published writer but want to make better cookies, it works for that as well.

Link via Books, Inq. via ArchaeoTexture.

"Take The Lead" - Formulaic but fun

Take The Lead is predictable, preachy, clichéd, disjointed, and illogical, with one-dimensional stereotypical characters...and it's a lot of fun to watch if you go in with the right expectations.

This movie about one man's efforts to use ballroom dancing to rehabilitate a group of inner city kids who've been written off by The System is essentially a remake of a much better film, the 2005 documentary Mad Hot Ballroom. The latter movie focused on fifth-grade students preparing for New York City's annual ballroom competition via the American Ballroom Theater's "Dancing Classrooms" curriculum, while Take The Lead is about kids in high school. The older age group introduces a whole different set of dynamics, most of them hormone-driven.

Take The Lead is, in fact, supposed to be the story of how the ABT program began, with Antonio Banderas portraying Pierre Dulaine, the founder of the program (Dulaine makes a brief cameo in the movie; if you've seen Mad Hot Ballroom, you'll spot him in the film's finale). Unfortunately, the "updating" of the story doesn't improve it at all, and the attempt to blend traditional ballroom music with hip-hop in order to make it more culturally acceptable to the iPod generation is pretty lame.

Nevertheless, the dance scenes and the individual portrayals and, yes, even the music make this a very watchable movie...especially for people like us who have only recently discovered ballroom dancing. When viewed as a whole, the movie falls well short of brilliance, but there are enough excellent bits and pieces to redeem it quite nicely.

Take The Lead is rated PG-13 primarily for language. No F-words, but pretty much everything else, so you might want to take that into consideration when deciding if your kids can see it.

Ant Rating:

Technorati tags: Take The Lead | Mad Hot Ballroom

Upcoming Review: "The Lost Blogs"

I don't usually publicize in advance the books I'm going to review. For one thing, I can't handle the self-imposed pressure to, you know, actually read the book. But I have to make an exception in this case because the title and subject matter sound so great.

The book is The Lost Blogs : From Jesus to Jim Morrison--The Historically Inaccurate and Totally Fictitious Cyber Diaries of Everyone Worth Knowing by Paul Davidson, and it purports to provide a comical look at what historical figures might have included in their blogs. I expect it to be silly, irreverent, and scattered...in other words, just like the Gazette!

The book won't be released for publication until May, but my review copy should arrive soon (courtesy of Time Warner Book Group) and I'll try to have my impressions online in time for you to decide whether or not to put it on your wish list.

Technorati tags: The Lost Blogs | Paul Davidson

An Amazing Three Hour Tour

One of the pleasant surprises of blogging is when someone stumbles onto an old post and it strikes a chord with them...and they share with you about it.

That was the case this morning when I opened an email that fell into my "Possible Junk Mail" folder (because the sender isn't in my address book). Here's the gist of it:

This was a new one for me...Amazing Grace set to the theme music for Gilligan's Island. But it took only a few seconds of humming the tune and then adding the words to see how it fits...and very well, too. At first glance, the tune is perhaps a bit too, um, lively (irreverent? trivial?) for such powerful words, but the change in key -- if that's what it is; I need a real musician to help me out here -- of the last phrase sort of adds some solemnity. And, in the end, Amazing Grace is a quite happy and triumphant song.

Works for me. But now, the question of the day is whether you've run across any other tunes for Amazing Grace. We've already got House of the Rising Sun, The Eagles' Peaceful Easy Feeling, and now Gilligan's Island. Surely there are others...

If it helps, the meter of Amazing Grace is 8.6.8.6. - Common Meter, according to The Baptist Hymnal. Granted, I don't know 8.6.8.6. from "25 or 6 to 4," but perhaps you do.

One more Apple/Windows post

For those who remain skeptical about the reasons Apple introduced Boot Camp, I strongly advise taking ten minutes to read Jon Gruber's analysis over at Daring Fireball.

He'll explain, among other things, why Apple doesn't care whether [many] people think its computers are too expensive, why Microsoft has to pretend not to care about this move, why "dual boot" is likely to quickly make way for "concurrent operation," and why Apple's new Boot Camp logo is cool and a bit saucy, at least from a marketing perspective.

Technorati tag: Boot Camp

There goes the neighborhood...

...I can see it disappearing over the eastern horizon. I just checked The Weather Channel and we've got sustained winds at 33 mph, gusting to 41.

Did I mention blowing dust?

But, it could be worse. Off to the northwest a couple of hours, at Guadalupe Mountains National Park, the winds are 44 and gusting to 65; they're forecasting gusts of 80 mph before the day's over.

I'd hate to be driving a big rig to El Paso right about now. (Well, I'd hate to be doing that any time, but especially right now.)

Book Review: "The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo"

If you've ever lived in a small town or attended a small school or worked in a small office, you're surely familiar with the gossiping, the flirtations, the unnoticed revolutions, the amateurish intrigues, the idle speculation, the short tempers, and the occasional tender mercies that are woven through the daily fabric of those experiences. These things are probably universal -- the plot elements never change, just the cast of characters.

Peter Orner thinks that the only truly exotic place would be one that's completely uninhabited by people. And thus it is that while the first novel by this award-winning author is set in the unlikely location of the Namibian veld, in south Africa, the faculty and students in the Catholic school that provides the main backdrop for the story will be as familiar to most readers as the backs of their hands.

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo is set in the early 90s, not long after Namibia won its independence from South Africa. There's a small all-boys Catholic school located in Goas, which the reader will come to view as dry and dreary and hopeless as place as any ever portrayed in a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. Into this barren backwater (sans the water) comes Larry Kaplanski, a young Jewish teacher from Cincinnati who has volunteered in a sort of Peace Corps-evoking mission to help educate young Namibians.

Second Coming is a stream-of-consciousness account of Kaplansk's (the others inexplicably decide his name doesn't warrant the final "i") time at the school. Despite what the book jacket says, he is the main character and most frequent narrator, although others occasionally take over the story-telling. Mavala Shikongo is a young and unmarried female teacher -- a veteran of the bloody war for independence -- who reappears, with young child in tow, at Goas after an unexplained absence, and after Kaplanski's arrival. As the only "eligible" female for miles around, she attracts the attention of all the men at Goas, including the married ones. Kaplanski is the only one to succeed in getting close to her, but with puzzling results.

I recently posted something about "blooks," books derived from blogs. Second Coming might be the inverse: a blog in book form. Orner has chosen an unusual format for his story. The book, which is about 300 pages in length, contains 153 chapters. Some chapters are but a few sentences in length, and none are more than a few pages. They're more like blog posts than literary chapters, and a given chapter doesn't necessarily build on or relate to those immediately surrounding it.

Still, Orner succeeds in painting a complete picture of life in a place that most of us cannot imagine and will likely never visit. The authenticity comes honestly; Orner himself worked as a teacher in Namibia. His descriptions of life in the drought-stricken veld will ring true to any desert dweller, and his insertion of various facets of Namibian history will be enlightening without becoming pedagogical. And his characters are uniformly complex and imaginative.

In the final anaysis, however, Second Coming may not be entirely satisfying, leaving the reader to fill in some significant gaps (the actual ending comes ten years after the rest of the book) in the lives of the main characters. Depending on one's tolerance for ambiguity, or willingness to partner with the author in finishing the story, this could be either a strength or a weakness of the book.

Notes:

This review is based on an Advance Reading Copy provided to me by the Time Warner Book Group. The book is scheduled for publication on April 24, 2006.

Peter Orner says that he writes by hand, the old-fashioned way, in similar fashion to another best-selling author. [Thanks to Jim for the serendipitous link.]

Second Coming contains passages with explicit and implied sexual content; this is not a novel for youngsters.

Technorati tags: The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo | Peter Orner

Wall Street Likes Boot Camp

I'm not the only one waxing a bit enthusiastic about the potential value in Apple's move to facilitate loading and running Windows on its Intel CPUs. Apple's stock was up almost 10% today after the announcement about Boot Camp. In more dramatic terms, Apple added $5 billion to its market capitalization today.

Got a little spare change to invest? The stock analysts interviewed by the Wall Street Journal today unanimously applauded Apple's move and have target prices ranging from $90-$103/share for its stock. It closed today at just over $67. Most of those analysts believe Apple's share of the personal computing market will start increasing as Intel Macs loaded with Boot Camp become more available.

Oh no! I'll bet this means more Mac viruses, and probably bankruptcy in less than six months! ;-)

Technorati tags: Boot Camp | Apple | Looking for the cloud in the silver lining

Midland Projects in "Pig Book"

Four Midland projects totaling $880,000 made the just-released 2006 edition of the Congressional Pig Book, an "annual compilation of the pork-barrel projects in the federal budget" published by the Citizens Against Government Waste. This year's Pig Book documents 9,963 projects costing about $29 billion of our taxes paid to the federal government.

The four local projects making the list are as follows (taken directly from the Pig Book database):

The code in the Status column means "No Budget Request" (NBR), "Added in Conference" (C). The Appropriation is classified as "Transportation" (TRANS).

The CAGW defines "pork" as any project that meets at least two of the following criteria:

• Requested by only one chamber of Congress
• Not specifically authorized
• Not competitively awarded
• Not requested by the President
• Greatly exceeds the President’s budget request or the previous year’s funding
• Not the subject of congressional hearings
• Serves only a local or special interest.

Less than $1 million out of $29 billion. Hmm. We seem to be underachieving in this important area. Based simply on a per capita computation, we got pork of in the pitiful amount of $8.80 per resident, while the nation as a whole was treated to more than $96 per person (using a total population figger of 300 million). Well, maybe this is one time that it's OK not to be at the top of the list.

Technorati tag: Pig Book

Boot Camp: Macs Officially Do Windows

This was inevitable, really, the news that Apple is not only not preventing users of its new Intel-powered Macs from installing and using Windows, but is actually facilitating those efforts.

Apple's new Boot Camp software, released in public beta today, drives home the ancient advice to keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. It's a smart move, in my opinion. Not only will it steal Windows computer sales (no more having to buy a cheap notebook or desktop just to run the occasional Windows-only app) but it effectively removes the last significant barrier to switching from Windows to the Mac OS (OK, next to the somewhat higher prices for the hardware).

This also seems to validate Apple's strategy of continuing to be both a hardware and a software/operating system manufacturer. Want an elegant box to run Windows? No problem. Want an elegant OS but need to occasionally use a, um, less elegant one? No problem. Apple's got you covered either way, and its bottom line benefits.

Potential problems? Yeah, there are a few. The ability for OS X and Windows to peacefully coexist on the Intel Macs might take the pressure off certain vendors *cough*Microsoft*cough*Adobe to release their flagship apps in Universal Binary format, as they reason that people that really want the software can now just buy the Windows version. There will also be inevitable (and, I suspect, significant) problems with Boot Camp playing nicely, with the potential for dragging the Mac OS's reputation through the mud.

But, overall, I have to commend Apple for reading the handwriting on the wall and deciding to take control of the class.

Technorati tags: Boot Camp | Apple | Windows XP

More Spam Ranting: BlogSpot's Enabling

Just when you think the spammers' arsenal has been completed, up pops another insidious tactic, and this one is annoying in the extreme.

I'm getting an increasing number of trackback pings from bogus Blogspot blogs set up for no purpose other than to promote various schemes, businesses, and offensive content. Many of these sites are also configured with an automatic redirect so that you never actually see the blog itself, but immediately land on another website.

Infrequently, the blog will actually appear and it's still got its default Blogspot configuration, including the "flag for offensive content" icon, which I always make a point to click. I have no idea whether Google's blog minions ever follow up on such flagging, but at least it's something I can do.

I've read Blogger's Terms of Service and it's pretty clear that spam trackbacks are a prohibited activity:

Of course, as with any spam activity the real problem is identification and enforcement. Blogger doesn't provide a simple way to report abuses. The last sentence in the TOS is promising -- VIOLATIONS Please report any violations of the TOS via the Blogger Support home page. -- but when you follow the link, there's nothing on that page regarding reporting of abuse. Very helpful, Blogger...pretty much what we've come to expect from you.

This situation is another reason why incoming trackback pings are no longer accepted on the Gazette. Life's too short to spend any time cleaning them up or even moderating them.

Technorati tag: BlogSpot Trackback Spam

Lens Babies: Giving Photoshop a Break

Lensbabies are described as "selective focus SLR lenses." They consist of an optical glass element mounted on a flexible rubber bellows that permits you to skew the orientation and focus "sweet spot" of the lens, yielding some rather unusual photographic effects. A wide range of apertures (f2.0 - f8.0) can be effected via interchangeable, magnetically-attached aperture disks. Models are available for all major brands of SLR cameras, and the cost is either $96 for the original version or $150 for 2.0 (the price difference is due primarily to the use of a better quality of optical glass and the way the aperture disks are mounted).

I haven't seen any Lensbaby effects that couldn't be reasonably replicated with a tedious series of feathered selections, motion and gaussian blurs, and perhaps an object skew and/or distort command in Photoshop...but "tedious" is the operative term. If the "selective focus" or controlled blur look is what you're aiming for, Lensbabies appears to be the best way to let the hardware do the work for you. And the gadget appears to be fun to play with. The biggest question is how they came up with the strange name.

Technorati tag: Lensbabies

Whiplashed by the Throes of Creativity

Brian over at BeanQuest links to this great website wherein a guy named Dave Devrie uses children's sketches as the foundation for finished artwork. Apart from numerous violations of international child labor laws (just kidding, Dave...just kidding!), Dave's work is delightfully creative. It also led me to think about the creative process and, much to the dismay of those who have some aberrant need to read every word published on the Gazette, to also write about it.

Primary vs. Secondary Creativity: A Brief History

During my previous life as a corporate drone, one of my peripheral responsibilities was to do college recruiting. This involved attempts to lure unsuspecting seniors into careers in corporate dronery, specifically in the area of accounting. Thrill-a-minute, adrenaline-pumping oil and gas accounting, to be exact. Our main competitors in these endeavors -- aside from the other major oil companies -- was the public accounting sector. I won't go into the sordid little details of the depths we plumbed in our attempts to lessen the competition's sheen, but we do need to focus for a moment on one strategy of particular relevance to the topic at hand.

The fellow who coordinated our on-campus efforts was named Joe A. Watson (the "A," we were told, meant "Accounting," in order to distinguish him from a fellow employee named Joe M. Watson, for whom the "M" meant "Machine" as he worked in the IT Department. Man, those were craaaaazy times.), and Joe was one of the all-time great lateral thinkers. He probably still is, but I lost track of him years ago. Joe came up with the idea of contrasting the work we did in private sector accounting with that in public accounting by classifying our modus operandus as "primary creativity" while those other guys were stuck in the obviously tedious and inferior "secondary creativity." (Note that we never realized at the time that there were actually technical definitions for primary and secondary creativity, the internet being only a vague concept, and the thought of doing any actual research being laughable. And it's a good thing that our audiences were as ignorant as us, because in Maslow's system, secondary creativity was superior to primary. But, I digress.)

In Joe's construct, primary creativity (what we did) involved being the First Responder to problem situations. That in itself was a bit loose and difficult to prettify, so we instead focused on secondary creativity, which we defined as something along the lines of taking the work someone else did and fooling around with it. The obvious example (if you were an accounting student) was auditing, where Company A's drones did all the exciting heavy-lifting, and the public sector auditors came in after the fact and <yawn> double-checked their work. Who in their right minds would want to do the latter -- and for 70 hours a week, at that -- when you could work in the comfortable confines of a Modern Corporate Office surrounded by the finest in Corporate Art and make Primarily Creative decisions until the cows came home, or 4:30 p.m., whichever came first.

Real World Creativity

While our "primary vs. secondary creativity" smackdown gained limited traction (which is just as well, as oil went to $8/barrel and our budget for new hires went to zero), I continue to believe that there's some value in considering that dichotomy, albeit without the judgmental baggage we attempted to hang on it.

In point of fact, I consider myself to fall into the camp of those who are better at secondary creativity than primary. Frankly, I rarely have an original thought -- even recognizing that in the cosmic scheme of things, nobody has original thoughts. But when given an inkling of an idea, or a proposal, or a snapshot...I think I'm pretty good at putting meat on the bone, of moving the ball across the goal line, of driving in the nail...in other words, of abusing every tired metaphor in the book.

I also think this has an analogy in the blogosphere. I even wrote about it, way back in Ought-Three, in this widely unread post in which I classified every blogger in the world as either a Linker or a Writer, and then proceeded to attribute primary creativity to Writers and secondary creativity to Linkers. It's all hogwash, of course, but sometimes you find yourself engaging in gross generalizations just for the heck of it.

And in Conclusion...

I've long since forgotten the original point I hoped to make in this post, which, if nothing else, confirms my status as a Secondary Creativitist. But if I had a point, it would likely be along the lines of suggesting that you might want to think about the concept of primary and secondary creativity (couched in the definitions I've used, not Maslow's loftier and more legitimate ones) and see if they somehow apply to your own strengths. The idea here is to get comfortable with your creative gifts, regardless of where they fall along the spectrum. The product of creativity is uniformly pleasing and helpful, regardless of its origins and I, for one, would like to celebrate it.

Blooky Here

As if we didn't have enough horrid sounding words built around "blog," now we have to contend with blooks...books derived from blogs.

Self-publishing company Lulu.com has even inaugurated an award, The Blooker (any resemblance to a much more prestigious British award is purely intentional, and potentially litigable), to promote this genre. According to Lulu, whose objectivity in this matter is, to put it politely, suspect, "Blooks are the world's fastest-growing new kind of book and an exciting new stage in the life cycle of content, if not a whole new category of content." Do tell.

Not everyone is impressed.

Link via Bookslut, via which we also findthis saucy little article about the new "anti-blogs," and an observation that the new editors of four Serious Literary Magazines are apparently zombies. As in "are you Night of the Living Dead in there?"* zombies.

*OK, more extra credit stuff. What's the origin of this quote?

Technorati tags: Blooks | Repulsive Blog-Derived Non-Words

"Kong" Gonged; Hopeful "Halo"?

I see that Peter Jackson will attempt replenish the capital he accrued from LOTR and atone for King Kong by creating a movie version of the video game, Halo, due out next year. I wish him luck, but given the underwhelming results of past attempts to bring games to the big screen, I'd say he's facing an uphill battle.

We were never able to work up any enthusiasm for seeing King Kong, and it appears that it was just as well that we didn't, for Lileks pans it mightily for, among other things, its absence of logic (gee, ya think?). But he's a bit late to the lynching; Jen had already warned us to seek entertainment elsewhere.

Game? What game?

I think there's a basketball game going on right now, but we inadvertently channel-surfed onto The Godfather II on AMC and there goes the evening.

The Godfather movies are on a very short list of films that demand that you stop what you're doing, sit down, and watch. Every time.*

Even the AMC teaser for tomorrow night's showing is good: "More Al. No Fredo" Heh.

*Well, III isn't quite as compelling as the first two, but even it has its moments.

Oy. What a weekend.

Ever had one of those weekends where every waking hour was filled with an important activity, the accomplishment of which seemed effortless, and at the end of each day you were able to drift into blessed slumber knowing you'd done something worthwhile and truly made the most of each moment?

Yeah, me neither. Not even close.

This past weekend was typical for us, stumbling from one thing to the next, making compromises, substituting "close" for "exact," desperation compounding bad judgment, making quick decisions we're bound to eventually regret...a regular weekend, in other words.

Take our bike ride on Saturday, for example. (Please...take it.) Our rear tire's sidewall suffered the equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death, giving way catastrophically, resulting in a blow-out of epic and irreparable proportions. We thus ended our ride with a four mile trudge in cycling shoes pushing a 10-foot long bike with a hitch in its giddyup reminiscent of Festus Haggen. Ever walked four miles in cycling shoes? There's a good reason they're not called "walking shoes," you know. And to add injury to insult, we were prepared only for a 1 1/2 hour venture in the sun; add another two hours of exposure without adding any sunscreen and...I'll let you do the math. I could go on with how I ended up with the wrong size replacement tire AND tubes, but I won't.

OK, the weekend wasn't a total washout. We did buy a new coffeemaker. We didn't need a new coffeemaker, but that has never stopped us before, and probably never will. We go through coffeemakers like The Donald goes through cans of Aqua Net. This one's a DeLonghi 10-cupper (although they're those sissy 5-oz cups instead of the hearty 6-ouncers we covet), on sale at the local Starbuck's establishmentorium. The young barista was so enthusiastic in her sales pitch -- and so impressed that we had our own grinder ("Is it a burr grinder?" "Why, yes...yes it is!" "Wow!" I was sure she was thinking, "I wish I had friends as cool as these people," while my wife pointed out that what she was really thinking was "I wish my grandparents were as cool as these people, and also helped me with hearty commissions from coffeemaker sales."), we couldn't resist. Besides, this model has the advantage of being smaller than a Mazda Miata (a distinct drawback of our current Cuisinart) and it has a removable water container (another Cuisinart shortcoming).

I'm sure there was some other fascinating stuff ("other" being pretty much the wrong word to use given the rest of this post) that happened over the weekend, but the only thing I can come up with is the fact that I need a nap.